I'm tired today. Just plain tired. Too tired to be anything else.
What began as a dream primary has become a nightmare. We've gone from having a deep field of strong candidates to celebrating two historic finalists to suffering through an acrimonious personal battle that has loosed some of the most explosive issues in American politics and society.
As people often say, politics ain't beanbag. Even in a Democratic primary, I expect candidates to criticize each other harshly, even personally. They'll accuse each other of exaggerating their own accomplishments, or distorting their opponents' records, or being beholden to some unsavory influence. That's part of the game. After one candidate eventually prevails, we take a deep breath, get together behind the winner and are united again.
But not everything is fair play. Even war has rules, and the political equivalent of going nuclear is accusing someone of racism or appealing to racism. I can forgive candidates for just about anything their campaign managers can dream up, but a few things go too far, and this is one of them.
After well over three centuries of rampant and institutionalized racism, we've finally started making serious progress towards ending it in the last fifty years or so. The process is still incomplete--only the very naive would think that we've moved beyond it. But there have been real accomplishments, and one of these is that racism is universally believed to be one of the most repugnant traits a person can have. A person who is found out to be racist is properly ostracized and removed from acceptable society. Their public careers, if any, are almost instantly finished (see James Watson or Michael Richards), and usually, if history remembers them at all, it is for being racist. There is no easy redemption.
This comes with a consequence, however. Extremely serious charges require extremely strong evidence, and there are few charges more serious than racism. If you accuse someone of racism, you are seeking to end that person's public life. You had better have ironclad, unambiguous evidence. Ideally this would be something like video of that person repeatedly calling someone a n*** at a comedy club, or video of that person looking into the camera and calling the cameraman a racially derogatory term, such as "macaca".
It is for this reason that I find the casual throwing of charges of racism in this campaign so extremely disappointing. It is bad enough when it's random bloggers, such as Kos, accusing the Clinton campaign of darkening Obama's face or stretching his features; or isolated academics such as Orlando Patterson, who seems to think that stock footage of children sleeping is somehow reminiscent of the Ku Klux Klan. There it's just the fringes of our everyday discourse.
What is far less forgivable is when a campaign itself resorts to such tactics, and regrettably, that's what the Barack Obama campaign has chosen to do. They first did so after New Hampshire, when a series of Obama officials, including Obama himself, tried to make hay out of a number of innocuous comments by Hillary Clinton and others--the whole MLK/LBJ thing, the "fairy tale" comment, etc. The racially loaded confrontation then threatened to spiral out of control, but both sides quickly called a truce and pulled back from the brink. The issue seemed to die away, much to the relief of just about everyone.
This week, though, it came back. Once again, the initial sparks--a photo of Obama in tribal clothing and Hillary Clinton's interview on 60 minutes--came from overly excited blogs, but the Obama campaign quickly picked up on them. Obama himself accused the Clinton campaign of circulating the photo, and David Axelrod today talked about an "insidious pattern". It doesn't get any more official than that.
[I realize not everyone agrees with my interpretation of events, but I don't think I'm alone in believing them--not by a long shot. I also understand that certain comments, such as those by Geraldine Ferraro, could be legitimately considered insulting, but even then they're not necessarily racist (just as saying that Clinton's success stems in part from her husband's career isn't necessarily sexist), and in any case Hillary Clinton has disavowed them.]
That the Obama campaign, and Obama himself, are throwing these charges as if they were water balloons is to me the single most disturbing development in this campaign. I'm not sure whether they're manufacturing their outrage or if they actually believe it, and I'm not sure which would be better. But that they're willing to impugn the names and reputations of so many Democratic Party stalwarts to help Obama get elected is very difficult to overlook.
Reading all of the back-and-forth between the campaigns and on the blogs has been depressing. The deepening disparities in the primary votes doesn't help. What should have been a cause for celebration in our party--the nomination of an African American or a woman to lead us--is now one minefield after another. Listening to it all today, I'm not even angry anymore. I'm just tired.
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